Why am I getting so much scam email?

[Misanthropical]

I put my resume up on Monster.com and suddenly my inbox of my regular email, which is only given out on my resume is flooded with scam after scam after scam.

It started with the usual job scams, investment scams and progressed to the Nigerian scams. I mean, I'm getting 5 to 6 A DAY!

It's not an easy email address either, so it's not like they could have guessed and gotten it right.

These people are not the brightest in the world either, since my email has my very female first name in it and the emails they send are all address to "Dear Sir". :rolleyes:

[Kogarashi]

I get that a lot too (yay for e-mail filters in Outlook, and an e-mail host who has a decent spam filter). That's the drawback with Monster.com. The employers can find you for jobs, but so can all the scam artists.

[digilight]

What they (the scammers do) is run a spider/bot that will actually spider across web pages and keep going to the different links on pages. This is why it is always recommended to never leave your email address anywhere its available on the net. If you have to always do something like yourname(at)yahoo(dot)com, while i realize this would never work for a resume this is also the reason to use a specific address for something like this and not your normal everyday address (it will keep down the crap in your every day account). Once a main spammer/list generator discovers your address you can be sure that you have been added to a lot of lists (spammers buy and sell lists with huge amounts of address's, usually numbering around several hundred thousand or more). If a spammer is blasting out a million emails at a time and 25%-50% of those are duds that means that 500,000-750,000 are good address's and out of that number if only 0.001% buy/signup thats still 50-75 sales (virtually pure profit because the front end is very cheap for the scammers).